Last Tuesday was the 120 anniversary of my mother-in-law Martha Schlegel’s birth. We lost her 28 years ago at 92, but she is vividly alive to me.

When I met Mom, as I called her, she was 72. Little did I know I’d get 20 more years to enjoy and learn from her. She had stories to tell that still make me smile. One of seven kids growing up in Jersey City, she was the master seamstress, consigned to making dresses, coats, even bedsheets for the whole family. When she’d had enough, she went to see the neighborhood “medium,” who “unveiled” mystical truths to gullible local women, including Mom’s mother. Mom paid her off to end the excessive needlework.

“I see a young girl going blind from too much sewing,” the medium told Mom’s mother, duly horrified. No more sewing for Martha.

Mom did work, however, until she was 28, old maid-dom then. “I knew if I got married I’d get pregnant and have to stop,’’ she said. She loved her bookkeeping job on Wall Street, which she traveled to by horse-drawn trolley. At noon Sept. 16, 1920, a huge bomb was set off near Mom’s office, across from the J.P. Morgan banking building, killing 38. Co-workers thought Martha was among them, until she struggled back late from lunch through crowds of police. Attributed to anarchists, the case was never solved.

Mom met husband-to-be Harry (who renamed her Marda) at a dance. She described the moment to me once: “The band played ‘Whispering.’ I floated into Dad’s arms and never left.’’ The happy idyll lasted until his death at 64. Ten years younger than he, Mom dyed her gray hair and went back to work, never remarrying.

Not that it was all roses. Days before their wedding, Harry revealed he was a widower with two teens being reared by his in-laws. Hurt at not being told sooner, Mom canceled the wedding. Her family, branding him unreliable, said she was better off. But Mom missed Harry, so when he called to ask her to lunch, she met him every day for a week, eating sumptuously. Then she scorned any food with her folks, saying she couldn’t eat because she missed Harry, never revealing the lunches. Worried she’d starve, they invited Harry for Sunday dinner. He arrived with a box of candy and a bottle of schnapps. They married soon after.

Mom encouraged Harry, miscast as a salesman, to pursue his artistic talent through a correspondence course in illustration. Meanwhile, she supported them by working at a bank, once cooking pork chops on an iron when they lived in a room with no kitchen. Harry landed a lifelong job as a designer for now defunct Paterson Parchment company in Bristol, Pa. Family lore has it he designed the still popular Land O’Lakes logo as well as many others.

With her loving heart and nonjudgmental attitude toward her four kids, Mom was a role model I’ve tried to live up to. Once, when we talked about her husband’s long battle with cancer, I said, “Mom, you’ve had such a hard life.”

“Oh, no!’’ she said. “That’s just life: ups and downs, honey.” I never forgot those words.

When Marda was 5, she was awakened by folks hooting and clanging pans as 1900 arrived. More than a century later, she is still irreplaceably alive in our hearts.